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iTunes users spend a lot on apps and music, not so much on ebooks (chart)

On Wednesday morning Apple revealed the latest stats on iTunes video: users have downloaded 1 billion TV episodes and 380 million movies total, at the rate of 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies per day. Combined with the company’s recent revelation that it has 575 million active iTunes accounts now, one interesting takeaway is that, while the number of iTunes accounts has grown substantially in the last five years, the amount users are spending on video hasn’t changed very much.

Horace Dediu made some calculations and plotted all of the data on a chart over at his Asymco blog:

Source: Asymco

Based on these latest numbers, Dediu calculated how much iTunes users spend per year on different types of media. He says it’s “about $9/yr on Software, $2/yr on books, $16/yr on apps $12/yr on music and $4/yr on video.”

On one hand, this chart backs up something we already know: that iOS apps — via a growing number of iPhone and iPad users — has been driving those iTunes account signups. As new subscribers arrive, the category of spending seeing the most growth is apps, at $16 per user, per year. In 2008, when the App Store opened, users were only spending about $4 per year apiece on apps; that number has quadrupled in almost six years.

But what’s interesting is that even though Apple says there have been 1 billion TV episodes downloaded and 380 million movies, that number spent per user is still relatively small, hovering around $4 per user, per year. (That’s about the price of one movie download on iTunes, btw.) And that’s even with the advent and growth of the Apple TV.